Say I have an open source project hosted on GitHub or wherever, currently in the public review, testing, and bug reporting phase.

The Asking page says:

...feedback on a specific working piece of code from your project...

That tells me that it must be a piece of code not a whole project. But I don't see why a whole project under review wouldn't be acceptable.

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If you read that entire section, you see:


  • Best practices and design pattern usage
  • Security issues
  • Performance
  • Correctness in unanticipated cases

then you are in the right place!


  • Tools, improving, or conducting code reviews
  • Trouble-shooting, debugging, or understanding code snippets
  • Higher-level architecture and design of software systems then your question is off-topic for this site.

Now what that basically means is that you can post a small, or large, portion of a project. Hell, you can post the whole thing.

What that disallows:

  • My project is structured like the following, is that acceptable?
  • Are there any bugs in this code that you see?
  • Why did this not pass code review?
  • Are there any missing tests here?

We review the code itself, not the general ideas. We may comment on the general ideas, but it's not a requirement. You can ask things like:

  • Here is all the code for my project, I'm wondering if the class X is doing things the best manner possible.
  • Here is all the code for my project, it's intended to be run in a high-concurrency environment so any critique in that area would be welcome.
  • Here is all the code for my project, it's currently in the bug / testing / public review phase, how does the code here look?

These are all asking for a broader code review on the project, some of them have specific concerns in mind, which is acceptable, provided you're not asking about bugs, missing tests, how to add feature Y, etc. Do note, this does not mean any reviewers will address those concerns, each review is in-and-of-itself an answer to 'is this code the best possible code, can it be made better?', which is the implied question for all questions on this site.

Lastly, I'm not sure if you're aware or not, but Stack Exchange has very kindly helped us with this exact issue. Code Review is (I think) the only Stack Exchange site that has a 65536 character limit.

And because those comments may be deleted in the future:

I just upped the MaxBodySize limit, so you should be able to have the whole code in the question body. For Code Review, I believe it's important to have all the code in one place. :-) – Chris Jester-Young Aug 15 '15 at 15:41

More seriously, the limit has been raised to 65536 from 30000. – Chris Jester-Young Aug 15 '15 at 18:20

So, tl;dr: you can post the whole project, you can have specific concerns, make sure those concerns are on-topic and do not be upset if reviewers ignore those concerns entirely.

I hope to see your question soon, and I hope you get great reviews on it! :)

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